The network specialist made the comments as it released its 2015 Annual Security Report, which examines both threat intelligence and cybersecurity trends.

Attackers have become more proficient at taking advantage of gaps in security to evade detection and conceal malicious activity, Cisco said. The company said security teams must "constantly improve their approach" to protect against increasingly sophisticated cyber-attack campaigns.

"These issues are further complicated by the geopolitical motivations of the attackers, conflicting cross-border data localisations and sovereignty requirements," Cisco said in a statement.

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The company referred to its "Security Manifesto", a formal set of principals that the company claimed could help corporate boards, security teams and end-users to better understand and respond to cybersecurity challenges. The principles insists that: security must support the business; security must work with existing architecture, and be usable; security must be transparent and informative; security must enable visibility and appropriate action; and security must be viewed as a "people problem".

Among emerging trends highlighted in the report are: snowshoe spam, a method where attackers send low volumes of spam from a large set of IP addresses to avoid detection; Web exploits using less common deployment kits to hide from security measures; and cross-platform attacks, where malware architects use two weak products, such as Flash and JavaScript, to hide malicious activity by sharing an exploit between two vulnerabilities, making attacks a lot harder to detect.